Tag Archives: holding hands

Jeff Foxworthy turns 53 on Tuesday.
The comedian known mostly for his “You might be a redneck” jokes has been fairly harmless in his jokes regarding gays but gave us gold when he sang “Islands in the Stream” with Kenny Rogers while holding hands. Classic. He’s currently in the reality show Shark Tank.

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THIS WEEK

Venus in Virgo and Mars in Cancer are in a sextile that suggests homey seductions. The best way to your intended’s heart, or other parts, is through dainty treats, preferably at home. These planets are also in hard aspect to Eris bringing a creative edge to competition, but perhaps too much competitiveness to your efforts.

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VIRGO Aug 23-Sep 22
Venus in your sign brings charm that you can use to social advantages. That can boost your sex life, but with complications. Volunteering time and effort for your community challenges you.

LIBRA Sep 23-Oct 22
You can accomplish a great deal sequestered at your job. That will arouse competitive suspicion, but who better than you to find a cooperative solution? Granted, that will be a job in itself.

SCORPIO Oct 23-Nov 21
Ask your friends for the most far out entertainment they can think of. Go one better if you can. Better yet, read something that will challenge your political or spiritual values.

SAGITTARIUS Nov 22-Dec 20
Slow careful moves promote your career better than bold actions. Take initiative to be helpful and look for problems to solve. Creative answers are brilliant, but can be divisive.

CAPRICORN Dec 21-Jan 19
You are likely to lose arguments with your partner. Pay close attention to understand his or her point of view. Your silent acceptance will be spiritually enriching and save your relationship.

AQUARIUS Jan 20-Feb 18
Deep insights can make work more productive but can prove divisive. Include colleagues in the process; make them feel part of it to help your team be more competitive and less fractious.

PISCES Feb 19-Mar 19
You and your baby need fun. How much to spend can be a bone of contention. Get creative about economizing. The best way to keep domestic peace is to keep your mind on long-term goals.
ARIES Mar 20-Apr 19
Being neat, sweet and domestic is the best way to sustain love or meet a new one. Resist being critical. If you can offer improvements, first make sure they’re welcome.

TAURUS Apr 20-May 20
You’re cute when you’re being shy, but being shy doesn’t mean being a wimp. If you have to choose between being adorable and standing up for yourself, you know what to do.

GEMINI May 21-Jun 20
Organize household finances or rearrange things to make more sense. Check in with your partner or roommates first. You get away with your initiative, but consultation makes it better.

CANCER Jun 21-Jul 22
It’s tempting to gripe about your boss, but he or she will hear about it. Tame your critical mind and turn it to your work. Among other benefits, focusing on productivity pulls you out of worry.

LEO Jul 23-Aug 22
Most arguments are a waste of time. Is convincing some clod that you’re right that important? The most important arguments are within yourself and lead to new realms of self-expression.

Mitchell, Bengston, Hershner, Giles are just some of the non-gays who have found careers, friends and family within the LGBT community

Stephen Mitchell has the world’s worst gaydar. And he has the story to prove it.

Mitchell, 24, started playing rugby when he was working in Antarctica three years ago. “I fell in love with the sport and every city I move to, I try to join a club,” he said. When he wound up in Dallas, he Googled local rugby teams. The Dallas Diablos’ site promoted a non-discrimination policy and welcoming attitude that Mitchell liked.

“The Diablos were one of three teams that practiced closest to me, but you wanna show up and feel you fit in well,” he said. “I thought, that sounds like an awesome group of people!”

After attending two practices, he felt accepted and comfortable.

But Mitchell must not have read the website too thoroughly. It wasn’t until about a week on the team, after his first game, that he realized most of the members were gay.

PLAYING FOR OUR TEAM | Stephen ‘Cougar’ Mitchell, lower right, is one of several straight members of the predominantly gay Dallas Diablos Rugby Football Club. (Arnold Wayne Jones/Dallas Voice)

“With rugby, on the field it doesn’t matter whether you’re young, old, your orientation, race — you’re there to have fun. Then we had [my] first team dinner, we were drinking and having fun and after I while I noticed a couple guys were sitting real close to each other. Then they started holding hands. I said, ‘Ummm, are you guys gay?’ I hadn’t noticed anything. But when they get drunk, the queen comes out.”

Mitchell, who goes by Cougar to his teammates, has been a hooker for the Diablos for a year and a half now, and although he’s straight, he loves being on the team.

“We’re a good, strong bunch of guys, but our club is more socially focused instead of athletically focused. We’re more about being a family,” he said.

He’s hardly the token straight guy. As much as 20 percent of the Diablos male members, including the team captain, are straight. In a society fast changing its views on homosexuality, finding straight people intimately involved in the gay community has become far more common.

Chris Bengston, who became part of the gay community before Mitchell was born, was a pioneer in gay-straight alliances. But Bengston initially felt the sting of discrimination from the gay community against her as a straight woman.

In 1983, Bengston and three friends — two straight women and a gay man — moved to Dallas from Peoria, Ill. They secured apartments at Throckmorton and Congress, just down from the Strip. Since she didn’t have a car, she frequented the bars on Cedar Springs Road with her gay buddy.

Even though it was a quarter-century ago, Bengston felt comfortable being among gay people and became friendly with many of the staff. She asked Frank Caven, owner of Caven Enterprises which ran several clubs, for a part-time job, but he brushed her off.

Then, on Halloween 1985, she got a phone call from the manager of 4001, a club where Zinni’s Pizza is now located.

When Caven saw her, he blew up; the only straight woman he’d ever let work there was his own niece.

But Bengston showed mettle and was put behind the bar at a different club, the Old Plantation. It was a more mixed crowd — gay, straight, men and women, Caven said; 4001 was for men only.

Despite the initial resistance to her, Bengston wasn’t fazed. Soon this part-time gig became a full-time job; she eventually quit her job at an advertising agency and made Caven her career.

25 AND COUNTIING | Chris Bengston started as a bartender at Caven more than a quarter century ago, She was the first employee to give birth while at the company. (Arnold Wayne Jones/Dallas Voice)

“Just because I was straight, the fact I was working in a gay bar didn’t bother me in the least,” she said. “We had a gay bar in Peoria we used to hang out at, and I had been partying in the clubs for over a year before I started working there. To me it was a no-brainer.”

Bengston, now 62, was the first Caven employee to give birth while working for the company.

“I cannot even tell you the amazing support I received. When I had my son, they had an article in [the Voice]; they held a baby shower in the old Rose Room. My best friends are in the community,” she said.

Still, she recognized the stigma associated with being straight in a gay world: “When I would meet people and they would ask me what I did, I’d say I work in a nightclub. I told my son, Alex, never to say I worked in a gay bar when he was in school.”

Things are much better now — but we still have a long way to go as a society, Bengston said.

“It’s so mixed now: gay, straight, male, female, every color you can imagine,” she said. “But people still ask me, ‘Do you really think they’re really born that way?’ We all try to say we’re sophisticated and have come a long way, but we’re not as far along as we think we are.”

To look at Lonzie Hershner — 300-plus pounds of tattooed Texas beef — you might assume he’d be the kind of guy who’d beat up gays. You’d be wrong. Like Bengston, Hershner has enjoyed a career catering to the gay community.

The gay clubs Tin Room and Drama Room, the straight club Chesterfield’s and the soon-to-open Marty’s Hideaway were family-owned by Paulette Hershner and her sons, Lonzie and Marty. When Marty, who was gay, died unexpectedly last year, Lonzie took primary responsibility for keeping the bars going. That he is straight didn’t matter.

“It’s just been such a big part of my life for so long,” says Hershner, whose mother first bought the Tin Room 14 years ago, when it was a redneck bar called Judge Roy Bean’s Saloon. Marty was instrumental in converting it to a gay club. That was 10 years ago, and Hershner has felt like part of the gay community ever since.

“It’s such a comfort zone for me,” he said. “I have a house on Maple Springs — it’s my neighborhood. These guys are my friends.”

Marty was 22 when he came out to Lonzie, and was petrified his big brother would reject him. But Lonzie was completely accepting.

“It was OK with me,” he said. “He’s family.”

Because Marty was “the face of the Tin Room,” a lot of customers didn’t know Lonzie was his brother … or a co-owner … or straight.

“They thought I was a bear,” Hershner said with a laugh. “They call me Butch.” But just as big a deal as being accepted by the gay community is the acceptance of Hershner’s straight friends and extended family.

“I have a fiancé and she’s cool with it,” he said. “I get her lap dances from our dancers. Her own sons can’t wait ’til they turn 18 so they can dance at the Tin Room.”

For a dozen years, Tony Giles has been a fixture in the Dallas gay community, both as a personal trainer and (under his stage name, Tony DaVinci) as a model for Playgirl and other magazines and as a performer in solo adult videos. He’s now completely comfortable among his clients and fans (he and his girlfriend attended Pride last fall), but it wasn’t always that way.

“Before I began in training over at the Centrum [gym] in 1999, I had no prior exposure to the gay community,” he candidly admitted. “My first day of training was interesting because everyone said ‘Don’t go back to the steam room!’ As a straight guy, I was afraid and intimidated.”

A LOT TO LEARN | Tony Giles, right, knew nothing about the gay community when he began working as a trainer; he now estimates 95 percent of his clients are gay. (Arnold Wayne Jones/Dallas Voice)

Now, Giles estimates that over his career, easily 95 percent of his training clients have been gay.

“When I’m talking to other trainers, they kind of envy me that I’m training in the gay community because I’m busy and keep a good retention rate of clients,” he said. “When you’re training a straight guy with a wife and children, he gets distracted — he’s not consistent. In the gay community, you get that client that wants to work out more times a week and go that extra mile. He’s not your seasonal client.”

Getting there involved a steep learning curve.

“As a straight guy diving into the gay world, I learned a lot,” he said. “Not every gay guy wants to fuck you; not everyone talks with a lisp or dresses feminine … although my first day [at the Centrum], there was a guy wearing pink shorts and a pink bandanna!”

Working in the gay community opened his eyes a lot to wrong notions he had about orientation.

“Before, I thought being gay was a choice — a rebellious thing or a learned behavior. And now I know it’s not! I educate people on this all the time — I argue with [straight] people who say otherwise. You’re born the way you’re born.”

Giles knows that in his field — he’s also a competitive bodybuilder — there are some preconceptions people attach to men who work their bodies.

“I had this guy come up to me at Gold’s today and say, ‘I’m not gay but your biceps are really bulging today.’ I thought, You don’t have to say you’re not gay! It’s OK.”

Giles, Bengston, Mitchell and Hershner all cite the friendships and affection they receive from their gay friends as the primary reason they feel at home in the gay community.

“I didn’t grow up gay, but I feel guys who do don’t have a sense of belonging,” said Mitchell. “This team really provides them a family and a sense of belonging. That’s one of the reasons I stuck around. I saw how these people created a home. It’s pretty powerful.”

This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition Feb. 25, 2011.

Tyler Clementi

Associated Press

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — Rutgers University held a silent vigil Sunday night to remember a student who committed suicide after his sexual encounter with a man in his dormitory room was secretly streamed online.

The tribute to 18-year-old freshman Tyler Clementi drew a few hundred people, many holding candles, to the school’s campus in New Brunswick.

While some area religious officials briefly addressed the crowd during the hour-long vigil, few words were spoken by the participants. Most in attendance took the time to reflect on what had happened to Clementi, sharing hugs and holding hands with others in a show if unity.

Among those attending was Rutgers student Julie Burg, who said she wanted to spread the message that help is available for students in crisis.

“There are many groups anywhere you go to that could help support you,” Burg told WCBS-TV in New York.

Burg was joined at the vigil by her mother, Annmarie Burg, who was saddened by the events leading to Clementi’s death.

“It had to take such an unfortunate incident like this to create, probably, an even larger awareness,” the mother said.

Prosecutors say Clementi’s roommate and another student used a webcam to broadcast on the Internet live images of Clementi having the intimate encounter.

Clementi, a promising violinist, jumped off the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River three days later. His body was identified Thursday.

Rutgers President Richard McCormick said the vigil was an opportunity for students and staff to come together and “reaffirm our commitment to the values of civility, dignity, compassion and respect.”

The vigil was the latest in a series of remembrances for Clementi at the university that included the establishment of a Facebook group, In Honor of Tyler Clementi.

On Friday, students wore black and were encouraged to leave flowers or mementoes at a makeshift memorial for Clementi. The Rutgers Glee Club marched to the memorial and performed a rendition of “Rutgers Prayer,” which is traditionally sung when an important member of the Rutgers community dies or a tragedy happens at the university.

On Saturday, the school had a moment of silence for Clementi before the start of its homecoming football game against Tulane.

Clementi’s death was one of a string of suicides last month involving teens believed to have been victims of anti-gay bullying. On Friday, more than 500 people attended a memorial service for Seth Walsh, a 13-year-old central California boy who hanged himself after enduring taunts from classmates about being gay.